i am retired and my wife loves taking pictures nature.

i have an old windows xp limited gb 60 or so. should i learn on this or get a different pc.so as to transfer from her camera
or how does she send them to walgreens for making copies etc. seems like an easier way and i would like to help her.ps what kind of camera for her would be best. middle beginer?

thanx for your time.

dave

do i need a pc with memory reader card?
Hiya, Dave. Good news–you don’t need a new computer. Your current computer should be fine for digital photography (though I do love the newest version of Windows, Windows 7).

I don’t know what type of camera you have, but most cameras can be connected to your computer using a standard USB cable. Check your camera for a USB port, as shown in the picture above.

Or, you can buy a USB memory card reader for your computer if it doesn’t have one built-in, like this one. But like I said, you probably just need to plug a USB cable into a camera and your computer–I bet you already have one.

For a middle-beginner camera recommendation, I’d recommend going to a Target/Wal-mart and finding cameras that are small enough to carry with you everywhere and that feel good in your hand. Write down several cameras’ model names, and then go to Amazon to search for reviews and find better prices. I’d push you towards either a Canon or a Nikon, because their accessories are so widely available and can be transferred to new cameras. There are just so many good models available that I can’t recommend a particular one.

Good luck!

Let’s say I want to find pictures taken on New Year’s Eve, 2006. I’ll type date:december31, 2006 and press Enter. Windows Vista immediately shows all my files modified on that date.

Then, to limit it to only pictures, I can click Picture on the Show only toolbar.

Instantly, I see all the pictures I took that day. Any of these variations work, too:

• date:today
• date:yesterday
• date:december
• date:dec
• date:tuesday

You can combine this with other criteria. For example, to find text files that I modified today, I can search for date:today *.txt.

AQS goes far beyond just date. Check out these examples:

• genre:rock. Find all music with a Genre defined as “Rock”.
• Artist:”Beastie Boys“. Find all your Beastie Boys songs.
• conductor:”Gerard Schwartz”. Find everything on your computer that Gerard Schwartz conducted.

Like Google, you can use a minus symbol to exclude something (or the keyword NOT). For example:

• genre:rock -wait. Find all rock songs, except a song named Wait or songs by an artist named wait.
• date:today *.txt -cookies. Find all text files modified today except files named Cookies.

“OR” works as well, if you want to search by multiple criteria. If you have other good examples, please add a comment.

Windows Vista groups your files by date. Now, you can also manage them using that grouping. Click the down-arrow to collapse a group, and click it again to expand it. Click the line itself to select the entire group so you can easily delete or move the files.

If you have too many files in a folder, or in search results, you can quickly narrow it down if you know when the file approximate date the file was modified.
In Explorer, hover your cursor over the Date Modified column. When the down-arrow appears, click it. Then, select the date ranges you want to see. Windows Vista filters the display to show only the files or folders in the selected range.

You can do this for any of the columns–Type and Date are also very useful.

Riccardo Raneri demonstrates how to use a free tool from Microsoft, Group Photo Fixer. To use it for your next group photo, take several shots of the group. That’s a good idea anyway–with digital cameras, pictures are free, but so many people still only take a single photo. After you load your pictures onto your computer, if you discover that no one photo has everyone smiling with their eyes open, you can swap a person’s face from another photo. Give it a shot.

Update: James O’ Neill provides another interesting use for this tool–removing moving objects from a still image, such as crowds or cars walking in front of what you want to shoot. I could have used that in Pompeii.

Explorer windows in Vista offer several different layouts. To switch between them, click Oraganize on the toolbar, click Layout, and then select or clear the panes you want to see.

For example, the Preview pane isn’t shown by default. It’s useful if you’re browsing pictures, though, because you can see a larger version of the pic. After the jump, a screenshot of the Preview pane enabled.

Click the thumbnail to see the full screenshot

If you’re like me, most of your pictures don’t have useful filenames. You probably find them by looking at thumbnails. By default, the thumbnails are really small, though.

To make bigger thumbnails, click Views on the Explorer toolbar, and then drag the slider up to the top (or as far up as you want–the higher you drag, the bigger they get). Windows Vista might spend a few seconds making your bigger thumbnails, but it only needs to do this one.